It’s a late winter afternoon and Cleveland is shaking off a dusting of unseasonably late snow. The sun has peaked from behind the cozy slanting duplexes that line my brick street. A comically-large icicle is melting one drip at a time from the broken gutter of my rented home. Disturbing this peace are the men clambering around my rooftop repairing leaks and ripping up old shingles.
Hello, internet. Let’s start over. I’m Carter! I’ve been on a journey of intention. Intentionality in the way that I interact with the web. Intentional placement of my efforts. Intention to own what I create.
Likewise, I have also been on a journey to push myself to create better, non-comodified art. I have begun to journal my art progress - and in doing so found I want a more flexible way to store and parse this information…so, here we are! I plan to keep this as a little journal of sorts, as well as my personal and professional portfolio sites (eventually).
A Month of Progress
I thought: what better way to start this blog than a postmortem on my most recent pieces? What follows are my art journal entries from the last month as I refocused my art journey to approach it with new eyes - following along with YanSculpt’s course “Master Sculpting Heads in Blender.”
2/2/25: Session 1 ~2hrs: No notes, just reference and observation. Had difficulty making big decisions. Feels like I’m going slowly. Happy with my brush control and learning to go lighter on the brush for a more pleasant form
2/2/25: Session 2 ~1hrs: More observation. Scared to make big proportional changes and noticing more reference is, indeed, better
2/4/25: ~2hrs First male head session. Stayed extremely low density for an extremely long time. Struggled at first with confidence in the low-poly forms, but trusting in the process brought it to a place I’m extremely happy with. Tried to use grab as much as possible but .003 and lower Clay building is so important for subtle changes. Worried about speed…
It’s here that something quiet and devious happened - I got confident! I was extremely happy with how the final male bust went at around ~5hrs total, but as I moved on to the female bust I began to struggle. I started over again and again, a pattern that would continue for the following two weeks. I moved on from the female bust to other studies, but all the while I wasn’t journaling my progress or keeping time - two essential mistakes.
2/19/25: I need to do these. And to be congnicent of time. For the last few days I’ve struggled making progress. I’ve re-started this lips study 4 times. Worked for an indeterminate number of hours on a different sculpt today, and I didn’t like it. Recently developing a bad habit of “going back” a few versions and then becoming too precious to progress further. Also, I need to practice form at its base, clean shapes - spheres to squares and back again. Finally, I need to do paint overs or reviews of some form as to what I think “went wrong”. I’m not doing enough reflecting, just brute force. Work smarter, not harder Carter. Youve got this.
2/20/25: Did the cube to sphere and back warm up today with a focus on forms and letting myself be a little “imperfect”, which i think was helpful. Definately should use this as a warmup more often. Then, I started attempt number five at the lips sculpt, this time being cognizant of time. I’m giving myself a hard five-hour time limit and doing it in chunks of 30 minute increments to keep my eyes fresh. At first, I was pleasantly surprised by my progress in such short time - was really loving my big forms ~2hrs in. Now, 3hrs in, that progress has stalled and I don’t feel like the sculpt is a significant improvement over the last four versions of the same sculpt. I still feel I can get it to a place I’m happy with in the next four sessions, but will absolutely need to do a review post mortem session to learn from my mistakes. I can’t tell if I’m reading light or thinking properly about the anatomy, or simply reacting to what I see. I felt so much more cohesive a week ago. Feeling bummed.
Where we’re at
And that brings us to today! Where I’ve decided this is a task better suited for a blog than random text scraps in Google Keep. Here’s a look at the final lips piece.
And just two days later I did it! I got to a place I was genuinely happy with and proud of my sculpt. Below I’d like to reflect on the important lessons that took me here - first and foremost what happened between my last entry and this one:
I dropped the resolution back down several levels to rework the major forms after 3+ hours. I was scared to do it, but did anyway - and slowly worked back up again. It was 100% worth it. I need to embrace losing res when needed.
Another thing I need to embrace is the process. This was my fifth attempt because I kept restarting. Not only that, as I’ve noted, I was not being intentional about my growth. I wouldn’t dissect where a try “went wrong” or what could be improved. On one hand, I don’t want to work on a sculpt for too long, and it is true that more sculpts is better than less sculpts as far as learning goes -
But I need to learn that this is going to take time, and be okay with that. I was successful here by giving myself a five hour time limit in 30 minute chunks. Then, I felt good enough to give myself an extra few hours to “finish.” The limits dont have to be hard rules, but they should be goals to aim for.
I was so distracted on the first few attempts of this lip study that I didn’t realize the biggest issue - the lips - and even still was avoidant in fixing the forms right until the very end. It’s funny how doing this such small things can have such a large impact, but I genuinely think that the two simple but huge breakthroughs that helped me get here were these two images:
The image on the right especially helped me to realize that “full lips” doesn’t mean the lips pucker outward drastically - the top lip should still be an inward plane, the highlights should be along the rim of the top lip, not the pads of it. I think I kept trying to “puff” the front lip out to give it a full look, and I’d lose the shadow information of it falling inward.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
I think it will be useful at least in these postmortems to draw out the most important info I’ve learned for future me. So, in true Tim Rogers fashion, this is THE BOTTOM LINE of what I’ve learned in one month of sculpting every day.
- Be intentional about your growth.
- Set time goals and break sessions into chunks.
- Dissect and journal your findings.
- Don’t fight the process. Things will be ugly and they will take time.
- Try not to quit on a sculpt unless you feel theres a good reason.
- Don’t be afraid to lower your resolution for big form changes, no matter how deep in the sculpt you are.
- The upper lip is forward of the bottom, and is a downfacing plane. Light should catch the “lip” of the lip, not the lip.
- Try flipping into render view and testing lighting every so often.
If you read this - why?! (And thank you.) Hopefully, you’ll see me around the internet. Take it sleazy -Carter